Upgrading to Snow Leopard: Check the compatibility of your Mac apps

You should plan the Snow Leopard upgrade in advance in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later. As with any brain transplant that is the operating system upgrade, some apps won’t work under Snow Leopard until updated versions arrive. Major productivity apps confirmed to work include Adobe Creative Suite 4 and Microsoft Office 2008, but current versions of the Google Gears browser extension and Adobe Photoshop Elements crash in Snow Leopard.

If you’ll be standing in line this Friday to grab your copy of OS X Snow Leopard, you should know that not each and every Mac app plays nice with Apple’s new cat. On the surface, Apple’s flagship operating system is subtly tweaked with minor enhancements and dozens of nice-to-haves, maintaining the familiar user experience and Leopard’s look and feel. In reality, though, Apple engineers have completely rewritten 90 percent of more than 1,000 software projects that make up the OS X, bringing legacy code up to date with Snow Leopard technologies designed to make full use of the latest hardware, like the top-to-bottom 64-bit support or Grand Central Dispatch that distributes tasks evenly to the available processor cores.

Better wait for the first Snow Leopard update and do check if your Mac apps are compatible with the new OS.

Such a significant under-the-hood code overhaul usually spells trouble for third-party apps. There’s a collaborative project at snowleopard.wikidot.com that collects results of independent tests pitting popular Mac apps against the gold master build of Snow Leopard.

Luckily, most popular apps marked with “OK” include popular tools like Microsoft Messenger, and a host of major productivity apps like Adobe Creative Suite 4, QuarkXPress, and Microsoft Office 2008.

Apple Insider has discovered that the Snow Leopard installer will check your applications to make sure they’re compatible, moving known incompatible apps into an “Incompatible Software” folder. However, you should plan in advance rather than relying on the installer to single out incompatible apps. As with any brain transplant that is the operating system upgrade, developers of problematic apps are already updating their code for Snow Leopard.

Some developers will manage to extinguish bugs in time for the Friday Snow Leopard launch, but some problematic apps may not be ready for prime time. That said, you may want to postpone upgrading until all apps that matter to you run without a glitch in Snow Leopard. Of course, early adopters akin to installing the latest software will disregard our advice. Most average users, on the other hand, should either install Snow Leopard on a test machine or wait a few weeks until Apple releases the first Snow Leopard update and developers update their apps for the new operating system.

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“include popular tools like Microsoft Messenger”
I don’t know of any Mac owner that would be caught dead using that piece of MS crap. MS, the convicted monopolist, buys off colleges to force college kids to use their overpriced Office suite when Open Office would do just fine.